We are hoping to build a barn on our new property within the next year, but we don't know where to start!

Do you have any suggestions or advice you'd care to share? What kind of building (and who built it), what kind of stalls did you use, footing, etc.? 

Also, we'd like to do some pipe fencing - any suggestions for how to go about that? 

Start with deciding on your site and the prep.  High ground. How far from the house etc... Slope the ground away from the building. Scrap off the top soil and put down large rock so it will never flood. 

You can never have too much room. i.e. size.

Concrete your stall floors and mat over them.  Dirt and rock always have to be maintained. Concrete is pretty maintenance free.  

I have pole style buildings. But you have to decide if you want clear span or poles every 12' on center. If you go with clear span, you have the choice of buying pre-fab stalls that are 12 x 12 or any other dimension you want. If you go with poles, you can build your own stalls but they will not be 12 x 12. They will be whatever the distance is between poles since they anchor your stall sides and fronts. 

This!  Invest the time and money to prep your site properly!!!!!

I've never built but I kind of renovated flooring in a barn I was renting once. I got sick of always having to level mthe floors under the mats & the water/urine coming up through the mat seams when it was saturated outside. Definitely prep your ground and build up to avoid wetness. With the stalls we dug out about 9" down, laid a gridwork of posts down and laid decking over top. Basically built a deck in each stall. Between the posts we laid rock down for drainage. On top of the decking we laid mats down, screwed them down so they wouldn't shift and then caulked all the seams. Never have to worry about urine seeping through or saturation from the ground & you never have to touch the mats again until one needs replaced, which we have never had to do. The mats are still there now, used by the new renters and it's been over 10 years since we put them in. We just stripped it clean once a year, checked the caulk & touched it up if necessary & that was it. No maintenace. It cost about $450 per stall to do 12x12 stalls. When I build my own barn here in a few years thats what I will do. The stalls were all built by the owner, sliding doors with the bars. It really wasn't too difficult to do, I helped with a few several years before I moved in there. I would definitely have an area with some concrete as well if you can, it's always nice. The farrier likes to work in our wash bay because it's concrete and if I have to use things on their soles, like keratex, its nice to set the foot down on a clean surface. 

I hate cold dark barns.  I've seen many at the racetrack.  Lots of light and air for these horses.  

It's been 30 years ago but we put skylights in ours.   They've held up very well.

I can help with your questions on pipe fencing, we build a lot of it.  

I prefer panels to sucker rod for lots, I can't count the times we've reconfigured fencelines or runs and reused panels.  Around here 5-bar 20' panels have been running $75 and custom gates to match are $12/foot built to spec. We've used 4" pipe to make overheads on all our gateways so they don't sag.  We use 2 7/8 used oil pipe and pound it in then weld the panels to it.  You can also use wood posts and fence connectors lagged in - but pipe has been cheaper than good wood posts (green treat are not good wood posts, and we feel it's worth digging holes for wood posts and tamping them in with rock around them vs pounding them - pounding you risk damaging the top and opening up spots for water to run right inside your post)

Barn layout is personal preference.  We have open runs instead of stalls and I wouldn't have anything different personally.  Ours is working and modifying what we had and could afford so there's things I would change.  My hope is in 5 years to be building a modest indoor arena with a new barn space attached and we'll extend my husbands shop into the existing barn.

I've been wrestling with a crappy barn for years.  Drawing up plans for next one.  Here's my wish list from my experience.

1.  Add a few feet to the width of your aisle. My current one is 12 feet.  I wanted 14.  My barn guy said make it 16 feet.  You will never regret it.

2.  Add a few feet to your eave height.  My current is 8 feet.  I want 14 feet.  Or more.  Height is cheap to add and will give your barn a great feeling of size and ventilation.

3.  Stalls opening to runs - each run outside is partly covered too, by 12 foot overhang from the barn.  Less work since horses can go outside.  In a weather emergency you can turn those six stalls with runs (close the doors to the outside runs) into six stalls and 6 sheltered runs.   You have just provided shelter for 12 horses for the night.   But then again.  Who is crazy enough to own that many horses.  hehehe

4.  14" tall over head doors at each end.  With that wide aisle you can pull your truck and trailer into the barn when you have hail in the forecast.  Even if you have a tall sport chassis.  (needs min. 10' clearance.)

5.  Tacking up space 12 x 12.  Wash space 12 x 12.  

6.  Bright LED lighting

What have I missed?

How would you want your feed room and hay storage, and tack room? 

Assuming a 72 ft. long barn to accomodate your six stalls down one side (12x12) that leaves the other side of the aisle open for another six 12 x 12 spots.

1.  Tack room

2.  Tack up area

3.  Wash stall

4.  Feed room

5.  combine the last two stall for a 12 x 24 hay storage area.  2-300 bales.

Dave M, you just described our barn we just built to a T! It was designed by me and we built it ourselves so its nice to know we did something right! LOL 

Oh wow!  You are way ahead of me!  You actually built it!  Would you do anything different now that you are using it?

Bump

No not really, its pretty great lol. The stalls are 12x36 with 24' under roof and the last 12' is just an outdoor pen (we have limited turnout so we wanted big oversized stalls).  We used gates as the dividers in the uncovered portion so in the event of bad weather we can close the gate and it becomes the back of the 12x24 covered. No wet horses going back and forth on dry bedding! 

Sounds like a great barn! Any chance of some pics??
Eventually we are building one so I'm trying to get idea's so we can hit the ground running when we start....

Very nice, I like how its open with alot of air ventilation, I hate seeing horses cooped up in a dark closed in barn, now yours is the perfect barn with tons of air and light. Theres going to be some happy horses living there

What a beautiful well laid out barn Mrs.Stepniak! 

My barn is much more humble. But the one thing I did that just evolved as I had money, was I added length to one side of the barn stalls and put gates at the end of them instead of a solid wall so I can get the tractor in there to level stalls or add rock, etc. So I started with a basic 36 x 48 barn with 4 bays. The stalls were 12ish x 12ish (like I said they are dependant on the distance between the poles. The guys didn't want to build me sliding doors for the ends of the barn and they talked me into a roll up door on each end. The opening on the ends for the doors are barely wide enough to get a vehicle through it and with my mirrors on my truck, I can only back in up to the cab.   I've regretted that.  I've had this barn for about 20 years and I still wish I would have made them do it my way. 

Anyway, I started shifting from riding and training to breeding and foaling. So I added 12' more on one side so 4 of my stalls are 12 x 24 now.  I left the ends of the stalls open and put gates with a 4' gate in them there. In the winter I put up plywood to block the wind and rain. In the summer I take the plywood down and the breeze can go through all the stalls for ventilation.  

Wow, that looks amazing!!! I'd move in there myself in a heartbeat!!

Thank you for the pics!

WOW!! I love all the awesome and well thought out plans! 

That barn is gorgeous and so clean/organized! I love how the height makes it so light and airy. We also want to have some outdoor space on the back of our stalls - I like how you did that. 

Thank you everyone for the kind words! Building that barn has been soo stressful, and its still not finished lol!! The horses do not seem to appreciate it as much as I do but we upgraded from an old converted tobacco barn so we are all much happier! I wanted to add that the room behind the sliding door is an all purpose room that is 24x36 where we keep our hay, bedding, feed and just misc tools/supplies for the barn. It also has its own seperate garage door. We do literally live in our barn, 700 sq ft living quarters, so we wanted to make it as functional as possible! 

W. O. W.   Beautiful

I can't get over how organized and clean that barn is! Mine could just about qualify for an episode of Hoarders.

So I thought about it while I'm supposed to be working. Bear in mind I live in Florida and built for the summer. 

Things to get exactly right: 

1. SITE PREP!! My husband and I both grew up in the flat land. It rains, the water soaks in, you're done. And now we live on a big ol' clay hill. And the water doesn't work that way. It runs wherever the heck it wants to - right through the middle of my newly constructed horse barn. So we learned about drainage the hard way. 

2. Vehicle access. Due to the aforementioned site prep lesson, we brought dirt in after we built the barn - which brought up the floor of the barn but did not raise the height of the roof. So now, the truck and tractor won't fit all the way under the roof. Luckily, we since built The Big Barn so it's not really an issue anymore and the horse barn itself is pretty teeny but it's still annoying when unloading hay bales. 

Things I love: 

Flexible fencing - My whole place is fenced with ElectroBraid. I can change the layout of my fences by myself with an impact driver and hammer. For instance, I have a mare on stall rest who is the last animal I'd wish that on. I took the fence down on one side of her run and strung fence from the end post to the end of the retaining wall. Now she has a rehab suite and room for a pony friend so we both may make it through without murdering each other. 

Tractor access to the stalls and runs - I scrape them with the box blade every so often and I love it. 

Freakin' bright LED lights - you can see everything in the dead of winter

So many plugs and their corresponding fans - see above about Florida. I have ceiling fans in my stalls and box fans hung up in the corner all wired to the same switch. I flip that switch and my barn turns into a wind tunnel. It made August and September bearable.

The Big Barn - we got hit with a tornado back in March and took out our little tractor shed. So we took the insurance money and built the big barn. It's hay roll, tractor, lawn mower storage. We built it bigger than we thought we really needed and it's so worth every dang penny. I bought my first load of winter hay rolls the other day and it barely made a dent. I almost cried with happiness. 

The dump station - my dad plumbed a dump station for us this year to dump the tanks on his RV and my horse trailer. I thought he was nuts but now I get it. It's awesome. 

Things I wish I could change: 

The alley between the feed/tool room and the stalls is really narrow. I did it on purpose to maximize my storage/stall space back when we couldn't afford to build a wider barn. But I can only lead one horse at a time and I'm real lazy when loading the trailer.

My organizational skills - Seriously. Hoarders. There's stuff everywhere. 

I might move it a tiny bit closer to the house? My house WiFi juuuuuust won't reach.

Good luck! Barn building is fun!

Oh WOW! This is gorgeous. I love the stalls/runs. We have limited turn out also and I've been trying to design something that will allow us some flexibility when the weather is gross. The barn I have now for my horses needs to be torn down, and my husband has commandeered the other with tractors, hay, etc. So I'm hoping we can get something put up next summer. I LOVE yours!

Awesome! Those are all great things to think about. Vehicle access is important. 

How would you handle the ground transition from a concrete stall floor with mats to the dirt in a stall with an outdoor run? Just expect them to step down or keep the dirt built up or just have a dirt stall floor? 

Electrial outlets EVERYWHERE!!

THIS!!